The Atlas of Love

by Laurie Frankel

  I pulled into the driveway and my phone rang, and my heart stopped at my parents’ number on the caller ID, but my mom, not counting on traffic and thinking she should have heard from me that I’d gotten home safe more than an hour ago, was panicked only over my whereabouts. My grandmother was fine. I was fine. Everything (nothing) was fine.

  “Go to bed,” she said.

  “I’m still in the driveway,” I said.

  “Go inside and go to bed,” she said.

  “I have so much work to do.”

  “Do it tomorrow,” she said. “They’ll wait an extra day to get their papers back. It will be fine.”

  “I can’t sleep anyway,” I said.

  “Lie in your bed and see what happens,” she advised.

  Inside, it was the end of Sunday-night dinner. I had forgotten. It is amazing how the world—even your immediate world—goes on while your own seems stopped. It is amazing too how people manage to eat even when you don’t cook for them. (In fairness, they seemed to have ordered sushi.) Even Atlas was still awake. Everyone jumped up when I came in. Everyone crowded around and asked how I was and how my mother was and how my grandmother was. Atlas reached out from Peter’s arms to me. Uncle Claude humped my leg. Three people tried to give me food. I was really glad to see them. I was. It felt as much like coming home as going to my parents’ house, and I’d lived there for eighteen years. But I couldn’t do it. I was just too tired. I made apologies and explanations, ate one piece of spicy tuna, and went to bed. Ten minutes later, Ethan knocked on the door.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “I just wanted to say hi before you fell asleep this time.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  He sat on the bed next to me and brushed my hair lightly with his hand for a while.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  I closed my eyes. There was a knock on the door. It was Jill.

  “Are you okay?” she said.

  “I’m fine. Just tired.” My mantra.

  “Poor Janey.” She sat down on the bed. “Can I help you?”

  “Not really. I just need to sleep.”

  “So what’s going on with you and Ethan?”

  “What? Nothing. Why?”

  “Among other things, because he came up here right after you went to bed.”

  “He probably came up to use the bathroom,” I said.

  “Yeah right,” she said.

  “How’s everything here?” I asked.

  “Fine. Quiet. No news.”

  “Daniel?”

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  “Good.” I smiled and hugged her waist. She kissed me on the head and whispered good night. I went to sleep. There was a knock on the door. It was Jason.

  “I have a meeting early tomorrow. I decided to stay over,” he said, climbing into bed with me.

  “There’s a sofa downstairs.”

  “Katie and Peter are making out on it,” he said. “What time did you set the alarm for?”

  “Eight.”

  “That works for me. See you in the morning.”

  I was too tired to fight with him. “Good night, Jason.”

  “Good night. Hey Janey? Are you really okay?”

  I started crying. I don’t know why then. I don’t know why then and not when I’d said goodbye to my grandmother that morning and not on the long ride home and not in the driveway when I heard my mother’s voice and not when I walked into my house and this family and not when Atlas reached his little arms out to me and not when Ethan came up to say . . . whatever he’d come up to say and not when I’d hugged Jill good night. Jason made soothing noises, held my head on his shoulder, fed me Kleenex. Jason said it would be better tomorrow, and I just needed sleep, and it would be okay okay okay. Jason said my grandmother was one of the most amazing people he had ever met. He said he wished his grandmother—to whom he hadn’t spoken since she’d banished him to hell when he came out to her—could be like mine. He said she was one of the strongest people he had ever known, and he’d never seen her not get what she wanted. He said if she were here, she’d tell me to get some sleep. I snotted and sniffed and said thanks. I wiped my nose and eyes and tried to sleep again. Jason said, “Janey, what’s going on with you and Ethan?”

  Thirty

  When I pulled into the driveway last night and my phone rang, did you think my grandmother had died? Did you think just at the exact moment I completed a dark and rainy drive full of dark and rainy ruminations, arriving at last at my well-lit, love-filled home, my mother had called to report the horrific and inevitable (never mind I obviously wouldn’t have left if my grandmother hadn’t been much better and that timing would have been quite a coincidence)? If so, as I explained to my students Monday morning, it’s from watching movies.

  The film unit always comes second to last. If you do it too early in the semester, students think the class is a joke. And besides, they can’t analyze movies at the beginning. They can analyze poems on the first day because poems are obscure. You read them and don’t know what they mean. So you have to figure it out. Movies seem easy to understand. Everyone knows what they mean. They don’t mean anything. They just are. This is what students think when they come in. You have to wait most of the semester for them to see that in the same way that poems are meaningless until figured out, so are texts that seem straightforward, texts that seem to mean very obviously and nothing deeply right from the start. Also, if you don’t take a break at some point, they’re too tired for the homestretch. You get crappy final exams. Hence: film unit, second to last.

  All of which is to say that already it was second to last. Granted, it was only three completed weeks into term. On the other hand, we only had two to go. We were almost done. Students get pretty close in summer session because classes are small, and they spend a lot of time together. By the time we got to film, a couple of students made popcorn for the entire class. Two students, having met three weeks ago, were now madly in love, holding hands in the back, considering, I worried, making out during the movie. Several others had already cliqued up, laughing at each other all through class, whispering, passing notes. It was all a bit like teaching ninth-graders but, I have to admit, pretty fun.

  We watched Memento, which is a mystery told backwards so that the final resolution scene is the first thing you see in the movie. The point of the plotting, then, turns out not to be what happens but why; that’s the mystery; that’s what’s important and what we want desperately to know. My students argued that this is because of the way this film is told—chronologically backwards—so that knowing what happened is pointless without the setup. Their moral: knowing what happens is meaningless—literally without meaning—until you understand why. My argument was that all literature is this way because all life is this way—the mystery isn’t what but why. My students disagreed. They said in life you understand the why all along because you live it every day, and you’re in your head; you’re just desperate to know how it will turn out.

  “Some examples?” I said.

  “Will your current relationship end badly or in marriage?” volunteered the female half of the couple in back (the male half blushed so hard I could see it from the front of the room).

  “Will a certain drunken and unprotected hookup result in someone we know getting dumped?” offered one of the cliquees, and I was relieved that the whole group of them broke into hysterics, which suggested it had happened to someone they knew but not to any of them.

  “Right, but in that case, isn’t the why the most important part?” I asked.

  “Not of the mystery. We know why. He’s a whore. She’s a whore. They both drink way too much. She’s been in this long-distance relationship since, like, high school. That’s not a mystery. What happens is the mystery.”

  They had a point. It was this: they were nineteen year
s old. When you are nineteen, life is full of the what-will-happen-next kind of mystery, and the why seems perfectly clear and beside the point. Not that I’m middle-aged or anything, but it seems to me that the difference of just a few years is enough for a massive shift from what to why. It wasn’t because I knew what was going to happen next in my life, and it wasn’t because my life at the moment wasn’t full of its share of intrigue, loose ends, unanswered questions, and seemingly insoluble problems. Somehow, though, none of that seemed the important point to me. It was the reasons we did what we did, held and chose and loved what we did, the motivations behind the actions—which, anyway, seemed just to happen, whether we would or no, and so were utterly beside the point. Why evaluate what you do not control instead of what you do? Any of which would have been very instructive given what happened next if I could have remembered this wisdom, or any other, at the time. When push comes to shove, maybe we’re all nineteen.

  And maybe it’s why we watch movies too, to recapture the simplicity of a time in our life when all the whys are clear and make sense and the only mystery is what’s next. We go to the movies when we’re too tired to go out for dinner and conversation. We rent DVDs when we need a break because our brains hurt from reading/writing/teaching/thinking/working all day. Movies are about action, but they take the place of it in our lives. And whereas we expect most texts to follow logically from one point to the next, whereas we want our written endings foreshadowed in their beginnings and symbolized in their landscapes, at the movies we want distraction and surprise.

  At home, I found the former if not really the latter. Katie and Jill were fighting. I could hear them from fifty feet away.

  “You can’t ask Janey—she needs rest.”

  “I’m not asking Janey. I’m asking you.”

  “I can’t. I have a dress fitting this afternoon.”

  “How many times do you need to have your fucking dress resized?”

  “It’s not being resized. They’re just making sure. It’s my wedding dress. It’s kind of important that it fits.”

  “It’s not important, Katie. It’s a dress. This is my life we’re talking about. The love of my life maybe. The father of my child.”

  “Dan changes his mind on a weekly basis. I am getting married once for all of eternity.”

  “Dan only changed his mind once. And maybe not even that. But I can’t know if we don’t go out.”

  “Bring Atlas with you.”

  “He’s not ready yet.”

  “Atlas or you?”

  “Daniel.”

  “Well he needs to get ready, don’t you think? He’s a bit late.”

  “I’m trying but not all at once. Atlas has been really cranky the last couple days. I don’t want to freak him out.”

  “Why are you posturing all of a sudden?”

  “I’m not posturing.”

  “You’re pretending it’s okay if he doesn’t want to see Atlas. It’s like you’re dating him and pretending you don’t have a son. If he wants back in, why doesn’t he want to see his baby?”

  “Isn’t this what you want, Katie? Nice nuclear family all back together again? That’s not going to happen overnight. I have to work at it.”

  “It doesn’t look much like work. It looks like going to parties and shows and getting drunk and having sex.”

  “You don’t know what we do,” spat Jill. “And I don’t care whether you agree with it or not.”

  “As long as I scrap my plans to take care of your kid.”

  “Oh, so he’s my kid all of a sudden.”

  “Not all of a sudden,” said Katie.

  “I’ll take him,” I said, coming in, realizing that waiting out in the driveway for them to stop yelling at each other was going to take too long.

  Katie shot Jill a nasty look.

  “It’s fine. I’m fine,” I said. “I’d be glad to take him. I missed him.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind?” Jill cooed, and Katie rolled her eyes, and Jill was out the door almost immediately.

  I looked at Katie. “I was only gone a week.”

  She shook her head. “The first night they went out was the night you left—I told you about that. He called late and she left and called in the middle of the night and asked if I could hang on to Atlas the next day, but when I went to bed that night, she still wasn’t back yet. And it’s been pretty much like that all week. She checks in; she comes back briefly, but then she leaves again. She never takes Atlas with her. She hasn’t really even seen him all week. She barely asks if it’s okay with me, and then she stays out well beyond the hours I agree to anyway. She just expects me to pick up all your hours too. I had to call Jason twice this week to come up when I had to go teach your class. And I’m getting married in less than two weeks.”

  “What’s going on with them?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t talk about it. I ask and she blows me off. Sunday-night dinner was the first time I’d seen her for more than five minutes all week. And she’d only come home a little bit before you did. And she left after you went to bed.”

  As always, I spent less time considering my actual reaction than what I thought it should be. Or maybe I was just too tired to feel anything as exhausting as righteous indignation. It was unfair to expect Katie to do everything, unfair to discount the import of her wedding just because Jill thought it was too fast, unfair to foist Atlas on me when I had so much work to do, unfair to sideline Atlas’s needs for Daniel’s, and unfair to be so rude and selfish about the whole thing. On the other hand, this was momentous too. If Daniel wanted to see about being in our lives again, I guess she had to find out. She had to hear his story and tell him hers. They had a lot of catching up to do. So we’d just have to try and not kill her.

  Jill didn’t come home that night, and she didn’t call. Katie and Atlas and I all went to bed early and without eating anything, all totally wiped out and cranky and feeling borderline coming down with something. In the morning, we had a text message from Jill that she would be home by noon, but I had to go teach, and Katie and Peter were driving to Portland to meet with caterers. Jill wasn’t answering her phone. We called Jason, profusely apologetic, and he canceled a meeting with his advisor to come over and stay with Atlas for a few hours until Jill came home. I taught more about movies then spent the afternoon in the library catching up on grading and prep.

  It is sometimes true that trauma at home, stress in one’s personal life, sick relatives, annoying roommates, weddings to plan, and sunshine to sit out in prevent academic productivity of all kinds. And it is sometimes the only thing for it. Buried in the stacks, typing by backlight, I read about film theory, took notes, wrote outlines, and generally forgot about anything else. There is something too to this feeling of control. Some people clean the house (I wish); some plan parties or fund-raisers or church events; some people stop eating. It’s the same motivation. I may not be able to control anything else, but if I want to know more about something, I can find out. It’s very empowering. It is also like after exercise. I walked home feeling absolved and slightly high. I had learned something new, made productive use of my afternoon, prepped the rest of my film unit, caught up a bit. It’s a different kind of endorphin rush, but it’s there all the same.

  On my way up the driveway, my phone rang. And that’s when my life became truly filmic.

  Thirty-one

  It was Jason, sobbing. Choking sobbing so he couldn’t talk. I answered the phone to silence. If it hadn’t displayed his name, I wouldn’t have known who I was listening to on the other end. My heart sank and then my knees did, and kneeling in the grass outside my house what I thought was this: isn’t it sweet for Jason to be so sad that my grandmother died? And already, already living without her, I started to comfort him. It’s okay, it’s okay, or something like that; she liked you so much; she lived a good life; thank you for loving her. Mindless, pointless, and not really listening because he had said no no no no many times before I finally heard him.
And then, suddenly, in a rush of, I’m ashamed to say, relief, I realized it wasn’t my grandmother he was weeping for at all. These weren’t friend-sobs; they were parent-sobs. “Your baby?” I gasped, sorry immediately not to have put it more gently. “No,” he finally managed. “Yours.”

  I don’t remember driving to the hospital, but I must have. And when I got there, I couldn’t remember ever having left. It felt exactly like that night sitting with my grandmother all tucked in, holding her hand. It felt like waiting in the ER after she fell. It felt like waiting with Jill in labor, waiting to take Atlas home, waiting for Daniel to return. But it felt like nothing so much as my own cancer, my own heart attack, my own heartbreaking labor, my own heartbreaking homecoming. I felt like I had always been in that hospital. I felt like a lifetime happened in those searing moments of searching the emergency room for faces I knew. And fleetingly, only fleetingly, came into my mind the cold comfort that this was the best place in the world to feel so entirely like I couldn’t draw breath.

  I found Jason, wet faced and wild eyed and shaking so violently I could see his shimmer from across the room, wedged into a corner as if for the protection afforded by the walls.